Mobile devices, including but not limited to cell phones, smart phones, and PDAs, are often constrained in screen space, input methods, and memory. For example, screen space is often much smaller on a mobile display than on a personal computer (PC) display, such that traditional reports do not fit on a mobile display. Many mobile devices, especially cell phones, do not have touch screens or full navigation controls, such as a mouse. Instead, such mobile devices typically have track wheels or directional pads which are limited to two or four directions of movement. Memory capabilities are generally limited on mobile devices. As a result, displaying and interacting with large, complex reports can be challenging.
In order to display reports on mobile devices, most mobile reporting applications require that the original report be simplified. This means that a complex report that may, for example, contain many components or large tables and crosstabs need to first be re-authored into one or more “mobile-friendly” versions of the original report. These re-authored reports would have simplified layouts or reduced table or crosstab columns, so that they display and load properly on the constrained device. However, this produces a new set of reports that would required additional maintenance (by authors) and learning (by consumers).
Other solutions rely on a translation process, translating the normal output generated by a web-based reporting solution into simplified HTML that can be displayed on the mobile browser. Since mobile browsers are less capable than PC based browsers, attempting to display the raw HTML from reporting solutions will either fail outright or produce a visual result that bears little resemblance to the original report. Translation software removes certain features (such as CSS, complex table structures, and JavaScript) and simplifies the HTML (such as by paginating the page into smaller mobile pages) to end up with smaller, simpler HTML that can be handled by the mobile device.
Even if an entire report was capable of being rendered on a mobile device, the display screen is so small that users have difficulty seeing and navigating the information due to reports larger than the screen can display, or resolution issues due to shrinking the reports to fit on the screen.
Some solutions use elements of both simplification and translation. For example, the Sybase Unwired Accelerator platform allows users to re-author reports in an authoring environment, and then generates simplified HTML that is then displayed within mobile browsers.